CC's Mapping Again

[CoolCorky]

This time: Mars

There's a FP mapping contest to create what you think the "rebirth of civilisation" will be like. I chose to make the first human colony on Mars. I'm making a static background map, and it's not quite finished yet but here's a WIP video:




And here's a sort of progress showcase:




As always, C+C is appreciated.

[I, Farmer]

That looks great! What precisely is it in? Source?

[CoolCorky]

Mar 13, 2010 8:47:52 GMT 10 I, Farmer said:

That looks great! What precisely is it in? Source?

I'm using the Orange Box source engine, with primarily custom textures.

[The Pletch]

The textures seem kind of bland. I mean, the "house" looks like it's just made from pure concrete with no imperfections whatsoever (no dirt, no scratches or scars, nothing to give it realism), and the same for the generator, which appears to be solid, perfect metal.

It's excellent shading and post-processing, but it doesn't have any life to it. It still looks like just a 3D model rather than an illustration of the future.

[iBishyT]

At first I thought this was a TF2 level.

Also, custom textures? Dear god how is your sanity still in tact? For those who don't know, doing something as simple as importing a texture into the Source engine is a fukkin' nightmare.

[CoolCorky]

The reason most textures on there look really bland is because I'm still using mostly dev textures (featureless grey grid textures used when planning a level). The main texture for the house thing is using a custom metal texture with a bump map and specular map and everything, but I'm yet to place any cubemaps (which are what handle basic reflections in Source.)


And Bish, custom textures aren't really that hard to work with. If you have photoshop or Paint.NET or something, it's pretty easy to make sure a texture tiles properly and it's easy to create a specular map. VTFedit (which is what I use to convert the original .tga image files into .vtf files which the Source engine can recognise) comes with a built-in bumpmap generator which you can use when inmporting .tga files, so it's not too hard.

And as for the .vmt:

LightMappedGeneric
{
$basetexture metal\metalpanel001a
$bumpmap metal\metalpanel001a_normal
$envmap env_cubemap
$envmaptint "[.7 .7 .7]"
$envmapalphamaskenable 1
}

^I wrote that from memory.


EDIT:

This is what the house looks like when cubemaps are applied:


Ignore the tower, i f*cked up when replacing textures and am gonna change that soom.

[iBishyT]

I use VTFedit as well, but it's still incredibly tedious. Heaven forbid should it turn out that your spec map is too strong, having to go through the whole process again. Oh, and for some reason it's completely incapable of having both a spec map and a normal map (the spec map instead having to be the alpha of either the diffuse map or the normal map).

Compare that to UT3. It imports .tga files. Then you just plug them in with the node editor.

This is why I don't use the Source Engine.
Not saying the Source Engine is crap, far from it (just look at Fakefactory's mod). It's just too tedious for me and has too many "why not?" moments for my tastes. Doesn't stop other people such as yourself from doing cool stuff with it.

[CoolCorky]

Mar 14, 2010 6:19:41 GMT 10 iBishyT said:

I use VTFedit as well, but it's still incredibly tedious. Heaven forbid should it turn out that your spec map is too strong, having to go through the whole process again. Oh, and for some reason it's completely incapable of having both a spec map and a normal map (the spec map instead having to be the alpha of either the diffuse map or the normal map).

Compare that to UT3. It imports .tga files. Then you just plug them in with the node editor.

This is why I don't use the Source Engine.
Not saying the Source Engine is crap, far from it (just look at Fakefactory's mod). It's just too tedious for me and has too many "why not?" moments for my tastes. Doesn't stop other people such as yourself from doing cool stuff with it.

Uh, you can create decent-looking specular maps in Paint.NET you know, right?

[iBishyT]

Um, I don't think you really read what I said properly.

I'm taking a Video Games Design course at Uni, which I have been doing for nearly two years now, and I own Photoshop. You think I don't know how to make a spec map?

Still, sometimes i'll accidentally make it too strong, or too weak, or I just need to do slight alterations to ANY texture for any reason. Doing that for the source engine is way too tedious of a task, as I have to go through the whole conversion process all over again just to see how it looks. Heaven forbid if it's a MESH we're talking about, and it just so happens to be at the wrong scale (you can't scale static props in the source engine).

With the Unreal Engine I just re-import the texture .tga (which Photoshop can save to by default) or the .ase (which 3DS Max can save to by default), and there.

That's what I was getting at.

Not even sure why you mentioned Paint.NET as you can make decent spec maps in ANY program that makes images.

[CoolCorky]

Oh right I see what you mean now.

Out of interest, which university are you studying at? Because I was looking into video game design courses and the only one I found was one at the university of Bedfordshire. >>

[iBishyT]

University of Huddersfield. Our chancellor is Patrick Stewart. :3